During the manufacture of printed circuit boards, the boards must be transported from one assembly or fabricating station to another, e.g., from a component insertion station to a wave soldering station where loosely mounted components are solder bonded to the board. As the various assembly operations are completed, the value of the board increases considerably and great care must be exercised in handling the circuit boards to avoid any damage. The boards upon completion of each fabricating step are often placed in containers for transport to the next succeeding fabricating station. Thus the container must be designed to snugly hold the circuit boards during transport.
A problem exists in that various groups or codes of boards differ in size from one coded group to the next. It may be thus appreciated that it would be desirable to provide a transport container that may be easily modified to accommodate groups of circuit boards of different widths. Such a versatile or universal circuit board container is the subject of the present invention.
Various containers have been designed to receive and support a number of printed circuit boards for transport and/or subsequent storage. In one such container, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,029,208 issued June 14, 1977 to H. Fickler et al., there is shown a plastic rectangular box having a pair of opposed grooved walls for receiving a pair of vertically grooved partitions. The partitions are placed in the walled grooves at distances approximating the widths of the circuit boards, whereafter, the boards may be slid into the support within the partition grooves.
In another circuit board container construction, as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,261,464 issued Apr. 14, 1981 to D. E. Maitland, a box is provided with equally spaced vertically extending grooves formed in the four interior box walls. A pair of locator members are fabricated with projecting pairs of tongues extending from opposite edges which are selectively seated in pairs of grooves formed in the opposed box walls. The locators are formed with closely spaced second tongues to project toward each other and thus provide sets of grooves for receiving end structures formed on opposite edges of a divider board. Grooves of different depths are formed on opposite sides of the divider board for receiving first ends of circuit boards while the other ends are received in the grooves formed in the box walls. By reversing the divider board, circuit boards of slightly different lengths can be accommodated.
There is still a need for a circuit board tote box assembly which can be quickly and accurately assembled with a minimum number of component parts to accommodate and snugly support the groups of circuit boards of different lengths.